A website for social investment

Access was set up to make it easier for charities and social enterprises in England to access the capital they need to grow and increase their impact. We built their launch website on time and in budget.

The background

Access works to bridge the gap between charities and social enterprises on one side and social investors on the other, to help make social investment easier to find and more relevant for charities and social enterprises. We worked with their small in-house team to deliver their website ready for the launch of the foundation in early 2015.

The branding guidelines and brand animation were in progress but not fully signed off when we began work, but we were able to plan, design and deliver their fledgeling site in just under 10 weeks. This involved some u-turns and re-thinking along the way and so we needed to be responsive, agile and work effectively with the project manager at Access tasked with delivering the project.

Solutions

While waiting for the brand guides to be approved, we ran our own card sorting and planning process, developed the content structure and established the workflow needed to meet the deadline.

We devised a motif of rounded, semi-transparent and overlapping lozenges in the brand purple. Developing this idea further, we created banner backgrounds for standard page titles and used the same idea in animated titles on the landing pages.

The new organisation had no imagery to use at all apart from their animation graphics, so we were commissioned to source authentic images of people at work and in community settings. The image budget was small so we had to be creative finding suitable images that wouldn’t blow the budget, using creative commons and free images where possible.

We also developed new icons based on the basic set developed by the brand agency and animated these on the homepage.

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